Digital magazine company Issuu is now a collaboration platform, too

Digital media company Issuu has been trying to offer a better way to present content online. Now it’s a promising a better way for teams to work together on creating that content too, with the launch of a new product called Collaborate.

Issuu, for those of you who don’t know, allows publishers to create digital publications. They may resemble glossy magazines, except freed from the limitations of print, with support for multimedia and interactive content.

The company said that in a survey of more than 1,300 publishers, it found that 64 percent of publishing teams work in different locations, and they rely on everything from email to spreadsheets to Google Docs to InDesign to coordinate. Collaborate is meant to replace many of those tools, creating a central location where a team (particularly a small to medium-sized media team) can create a digital publication together.

When you build something in Collaborate, you start with a flatplan, where you can create the layout of your publication and move different pages around. You can also pull layouts from Indesign, if you prefer.

Naturally, you can invite other users to participate, so they can upload images and add their own content. There’s an approval system, as well as the ability to track the status of each piece of the publication as it inches towards completion. You can even place ads.

Once you’re done, you can just publish directly to the Issuu platform, which the company says reaches 100 million readers each month.

Collaborate is currently available to customers of Issuu’s Optimum subscription plan. Oh, and you don’t even need to be on a desktop computer to use it – it works on tablets, too.